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Offers readers an array of literature and of viewpoints on the use of literature to confront AIDS as a social, literary, and medical phenomenon.
This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty first century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the ways in which grief is expressed and worked out in literature, showing how key texts from the AIDS crisis by authors such as Edmund White, Michael Cunningham, Eve Sedgwick – and also, later, the archives of The ACT UP Oral History Project - lie both within the tradition of gay writing and a postmodernist poetics. The book demonstrates how literary texts both expose and construct personal identity, how they expose and produce sexual identities, and how gay and queer identities were written onto the page, but also constructed and consolidated by these very texts. Pearl argues that the division between realist and postmodern, and gay and queer, respectively, is determined by whether the experience expressed and accounted is mediated through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning or melancholia, and is marked by a kind of coherence or chaos in the texts themselves. This study presents an important development in scholarly work in gay literary studies, queer theory, and AIDS representation.
Literary and Visual Representations of HIV/AIDS: Forty Years Later depicts how film and literature about the HIV/AIDS crisis expand upon the issues generated by the epidemic. This collection fills an important gap in the scholarship on HIV/AIDS, by bringing together essays by both established and junior scholars on visual and literary representations of HIV/AIDS. Almost forty years after the first reported cases of what would later be defined as AIDS, this book looks back across the decades at works of literature and film to discuss how the representation of HIV/AIDS has shifted in media. This book argues that literature constitutes a very powerful response to AIDS that ripples into film and politics, driving the changes in past and contemporary representations of HIV/AIDS. The book also expands discussion of the issues generated and amplified by the epidemic to consider how HIV/AIDS has been portrayed in the United States, Western and Southern Africa, Western Europe, and East Asia.
This book examines the various psychosocial and sexual ordeals of African American people living with HIV or AIDS (PLWH/PLWAs) as depicted in African American literary narratives dealing with HIV/AIDS published from 1980 to 2010. Central to these texts are the psychosocial and sexual challenges faced by the African American PLWH/PLWAs and the various adaptive strategies they choose to come to terms with their HIV/AIDS identity. Although PLWH/PLWAs irrespective of race confront these brutal realities, the intersection of a mythologized black sexuality, homophobia and intra-community marginalization places African American PLWH/PLWAs in an unenviable position. While abjection and social death rupture the social self of PLWH/PLWAs, the ostracization they suffer as a result of their diagnosis affects their sexual self, leading to sexual death. In addition to illustrating the social and sexual issues of PLWH/PLWAs in relation to race, sexuality and gender, the African American HIV/AIDS literary narratives studied here also foreground various coping strategies conscripted by PLWH/PLWAs to surmount the onerous psychosocial and sexual challenges they face. In view of the above concerns, this study analyses social death, sexual death and coping in relation to HIV/AIDS at three levels, namely the intersection of blackness, sexuality and HIV/AIDS; the impact of such an intersection on the sexual life of black PLWH/PLWAs; and, finally, the envisioned coping strategies for affirmative survival. This book offers insightful critical analysis of HIV/AIDS literary narratives by celebrated authors such as Samuel R. Delany, Cheryl L. West, Essex Hemphill, Michael B. Hunter, Steven Corbin, Charlotte Watson Sherman, Sapphire, Pearl Cleage, Sheneshka Jackson, Gil R. Robertson, and Marvelyn Brown.
Telling Time is a scholarly book that explores how novelists wrote about AIDS during the first decade of the epidemic, when HIV and AIDS were considered death sentences and most often associated with homosexuality and the gay community. The book explores the different narrative strategies used by novelists to represent the temporality of AIDS, looking at Paul Reed’s Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, David Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion, and Paul Monette’s Afterlife and Halfway Home, and how a few novels did manage to resist the apocalyptic dominant rhetoric of AIDS. The book also discusses the difficulties of publishing AIDS novels by people of color and such writers as E. Lynn Harris and Steve Corbin. Telling Time includes a comprehensive annotated bibliography of all American AIDS novels published from 1982-1992 as a reference guide for further reading.
Gay and Lesbian Literature Since World War II chronicles the multifaceted explosion of gay and lesbian writing that has taken place in the second half of the twentieth century. Encompassing a wide range of subject matter and a balance of gay and lesbian concerns, it includes work by established scholars as well as young theoreticians and archivists who have initiated new areas of investigation. The contributors’examinations of this rich literary period make it easy to view the half-century from 1948 to 1998 as the Queer Renaissance. Included in Gay and Lesbian Literature Since World War II are critical and social analyses of literary movements, novels, short fiction, periodicals, and poetry as well as a look at the challenges of establishing a repository for lesbian cultural history. Specific chapters in this groundbreaking work trace the development of gay poetry in America after World War II; examine how AIDS is represented in the first four Latino novels to deal with the subject matter; and chronicle the birth of lesbian-feminist publishing in the 1970s--showing how it created a flourishing gay literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Other chapters: outline the history of The Ladder from its initial publication in 1956 as the official vehicle of the Daughters of Bilitis to its final issue as a privately published literary magazine in 1972 examine Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country and discuss the complicated critical history of this work and its relation to Baldwin’s literary reputation--racial, sexual, and political factors are taken into account chart how Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote, and The House of Breath, by William Goyen, reveal contradictory genderings of male homosexuality--suggesting an absence of a unified model of mid-twentieth-century male homosexuality argue that the 1976 novel Lover, by Bertha Harris, can be considered an exemplary novel within discussions of both postmodern fiction and lesbian theory. (The author calls for Harris to be added to the group of writers such as Wittig, Anzaldúa, Lorde, and Winterson, who are discussed within the context of a postmodern lesbian narrative.) examine the short fiction of Canadian lesbian novelist Jane Rule in an effort to shed light on lesbian creative practice in the homophobic climate of postwar North America argue for an understanding of Dale Peck’s novel Martin and John as an attempt to link two apparently different processes of import to contemporary male subjects through examination of the novel alongside selected passages from Nietzsche and Freud focus on the pragmatic issues of developing and maintaining accessible research venues from which to cultivate the study of racial and cultural diversity in lesbian lives Document the history of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, one of the first lesbian-specific collections in the world, from its birth in the early 1970s to the present.
This volume examines the complex medical, social, ethical, financial, and scientific problems arising from the AIDS epidemic and offers dozens of public policy and research recommendations for an appropriate national response to this dread disease.
AIDS-Trauma and Politics considers American literary representations of the social and political silence surrounding the AIDS crisis in the U.S. in the 1980s. The book offers close readings of such authors as Paul Monette, Mark Doty, Rafael Campo, Sarah Schulman, Tony Kushner, and Larry Kramer in order to argue that the AIDS crisis was born largely without a witness and, as a result, marks a significant trauma in U.S. history. Grounded by trauma studies, AIDS-Trauma and Politics argues that the arts, exemplified here by literature and film, uniquely underscore social problems otherwise overlooked by such discourses as politics, the law, and journalism. Defining the 1980s AIDS crisis as a perfect case, this book proposes to redefine trauma not simply as an event that happened too soon, but rather as an ongoing series of oversights resulting in a failure to acknowledge or witness the humanity of those who suffer.